GLADIO AND THE OCCULT

Although it referred to specifically the Italian branch, the name Gladio was applied to a network of fascist terrorist groups employed by the CIA and NATO. Known as “stay-behind” units, their purported purpose was to resist a Soviet invasion from within. Instead, they were mainly employed in carrying out violent acts of terrorism, known in Italy as the “Strategy of Tension,” which were falsely blamed on communist groups to undermine the influence of the Left in various parts of Europe.

Gladio was ultimately a synarchist organization. Synarchism is the true political ideology of the occult establishment. Dating back to Martinism in the 18th century, synarchism was expounded by Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (1842 – 1909), who regarded it as the perfect political system, used to govern Agartha, a secret empire hidden in the hollow earth.

Gladio was headed by Knight of Malta Alexander Haig, in collaboration with the notorious P2 Masonic lodge, to which belonged numerous members of the Sovereign Military Order of the Knighs of Malta (SMOM) and the Italian Social Movement (MSI), formed in 1946 by supporters of Mussolini.

The neo-fascist MSI was inspired by the thought of Julius Evola (1898 – 1974), the most important personality in Traditionalism after Rene Guénon, who was strongly influenced by Saint-Yves. Evola reflected the synarchist belief in the right to rule of adepts of secret societies. According to Evola, the superior priestly class of the world of Tradition was not merely a professional priesthood, but royalty itself because, in Evola’s view, temporal power proceeded from spiritual authority. Alluding to the theurgic nature of ancient magical ritual, Evola regards kings and the priestly caste as performing the sacred rites that connected human society to the gods: “The supernatural element was the foundation of the idea of a traditional patriciate and of legitimate royalty: What constituted an ancient aristocrat was not merely a biological legacy or a racial selection, but rather a sacred tradition.”[1]

Pino Rauti and others broke away from the MSI in 1956 and founded the Ordine Nuovo party, while Stefano Delle Chiaie founded the National Vanguard. Both organizations were key components of the infamous Gladio. Chiaie was a friend of Licio Gelli, Knight of Malta and P2’s Grand Master. Chiaie was also a close ally of Junio Valerio Borghese, an Italian Navy commander during the regime of Benito Mussolini and admirer of Evola. At the end of World War II, Borghese was rescued by James Jesus Angleton, a Knight of Malta and later the long-time chief of Counterintelligence at the CIA, as well as heading the Vatican Desk and the Israel Desk.

Borghese was then tried and convicted of collaboration with the Nazis, but offered a reduced sentence, due to his glorious expeditions during the war. Borghese was born into one of the leading families of the Black Nobility, the House of Borghese, of which Pope Paul V was a notable member and which maintains close ties to the Vatican.

Another occult organization that Gladio was affiliated with was the notorious UFO cult known as the Solar Temple. The Solar Temple was based upon a legend of the continuing existence of the Knights Templar, who are regarded in Freemasonry as having imported occult doctrines from the Middle East during the Crusades.

The Solar Temple’s precursor was the Sovereign Order of the Temple, founed by Eugene Canseliet. Canseliet had also been a member of the Brotherhood of Heliopolis with French occultist Schwaler de Lubicz.[2] Schwaller de Lubicz, a student of Theosophy and Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s synarchy. Despite being born of a Jewish mother, de Lubicz with other members of the Theosophical Society broke away to form an occult right-wing and anti-Semitic organization, which he called Les Veilleurs, “the Watchers,” to which the young Rudolf Hess also belonged.[3]

In Belgium and France the Gladio networks were known as Plan Bleu, La Rose des Vents and Arc-en-ciel, the regional branch of Gladio of Lyon headed by François de Grossouvre. In 1981, de Grossouvre became the adviser of President Francois Mitterrand, for secret operations. Mitterrand’s had been a member of a synarchist organization known as the Cagoule. Mitterrand’s connection to the occult was popularized in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, where the glass pyramid he had constructed at the Louvre, becomes the purported burial place of the Holy Grail.

Mitterrand’s monuments’ esoteric symbolism is acknowledged even by mainstream writers, such as Marie Delarue in her 1999 study tellingly entitled, A Republican Pharaoh. She refers to the Parisian buildings as “a journey for initiates,” noting that they “seem to relate more to personal destiny and François Mitterrand’s pronounced taste for hermeticism and the Sacred Science, than to the politics of socialist governments.”[4]

Grossouvre asked Constantin Melnik, leader of the French secret services during the Algerian War of Independence, who had been in comfortable exile in the US, to return to activity. Melnik, who was the head of the SDECE and trained by the RAND Corporation, conceived of La Main Rouge (“the Red Hand”), a group of state-sponsored terrorists who operated in the Algerian War. Constantin Melnik is alleged to have been involved in the creation in 1952 of the Ordre Souverain du Temple Solaire (OSTS), an ancestor of the Order of the Solar Temple.

Order of the Solar Temple was created by former members of the neo-Rosicrucian organization, Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), in which was involved the SDECE, France’s external intelligence agency from 1944 to 1982. French journalist Serge Hutin reported links between AMORC, the CIA, P2, the Corsican Mafia, the SAC (Service d’Action Civique, France’s Civic Action Service) and various other knightly orders, and their involvement in international terrorism.[5] The OSTS’s Gladio connection explains the military aspects about the order that its members noticed.[6]

The Solar Temple is closely associated with a similarly named organization, the Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple, founded at the chateau of Arginy in the Beaujolais region of France in 1952. Involved in the founding of the order was Eugene Canseliet, who had also been a member with Schwaller de Lubicz of the Brotherhood of Heliopolis, according to whom Melchizedek was the emissary of a planet called Heliopolis, which orbits Sirius.[7] The Order soon attracted members of high society, being officially sponsored by Prince Rainier III of Monaco, with his wife Princess Grace becoming a member.

On December 21, 1997 Channel Four in the UK aired a special by investigative reporters David Carr-Brown and David Cohen, where the man who claimed to have been the chauffeur of a member of the order, Joseph Di Mambro, disguised under the alias of “Georges Leroux,” according to whom Princess Grace contributed $10 million to the OTS and agreed to pay another $6 million. She then became disillusioned with Di Mambro and threatened to expose him. On September 13, 1982, she died in a car accident, and “Leroux” implies that foul play may have been involved, orchestrated by Di Mambro.

In 1968, a schismatic order was renamed the Renewed Order of the Solar Temple (ROTS) under the leadership of French right-wing political activist Julien Origas, of whom some reports have claimed he was a Nazi SS member during WWII. Hutin also reported that the knights of the SAC, a parallel French police force, had links with Julien Origas and Raymond Bernard.[8] Raymond Bernard had asked Julien Origas to establish a chapter of the Sovereign Order of the Initiatory Temple (OSTI) in 1971. OSTI evolved from the Martinist leader Papus, under whom were amalgamated a number of occult groups, including the Order of the Temple established in 1804 by Fabré-Palaprat claiming himself last in line of the Grand Masters of the Templars, according to the Charter of Larmenius.

In 1981, Julian Origas became acquainted with Luc Jouret, a Belgian ex-military official with ties to Gladio.[9] Together with Joseph Di Mambro they founded the Solar Temple. By their own admission, the aims of the Solar Temple included establishing “correct notions of authority and power in the world,” preparing for the Second Coming of Jesus as a solar god-king and furthering a unification of all Christian churches and Islam.[10] The group reportedly drew some inspiration for its teachings from Aleister Crowley’s OTO and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.[11]

George D. Chryssides of the University of Wolverhampton, cited the influence of Alice Bailey’s ideas on the Order of the Solar Temple and related UFO organizations.[12] According to the Solar Temple, the star Sirius was the home of a number of Ascended Masters, also known as the Great White Brotherhood, who came to earth and inhabited Agartha. The reason of the suicide of the members of the Solar Temple was ostensibly to return “home” to the Sirius system. Documents posted to the media by the leaders of the cult stated: “The Great White Lodge of Sirius has decreed the Recall of the last authentic Bearers of an Ancestral Wisdom.” Also, the Solar Temple placed emphasis on the Great Pyramid at Giza as the focus for some immanent event in the coming years. As well, the Solar Temple stressed the importance of the Great Pyramid, which they claimed would be the focus for some momentous event in the coming years.[13]

Between 1994 and 1997, a number of Solar Temple members were murdered in ritualistic fashion or committed mass suicide. The deaths occurred in Cheiry and Salvan, in western Switzerland; Vercors, France; and Morin Heights and Saint-Casimir, Quebec. The Solar Temple in Canada was specifically linked with the electricity corporation Hydro-Québec. French-Canadian journalist Pierre Tourangeau investigated the sect for two years. A few days after the mass murder, he reported that the sect was financed by the proceeds of gun-running to Europe and South America. Simultaneously, Radio Canada announced that the group earned hundreds of millions of dollars laundering the profits through the infamous BCCI. Montreal’s La Presse observed: “each new piece of information only thickens the mystery.”[14]